


[vid] Something Good (Will Come From That)

by sanguinity



Series: sang's moreholmes [1]
Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Other, Video
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-23
Updated: 2016-10-19
Packaged: 2018-07-16 22:14:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7286698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanguinity/pseuds/sanguinity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>100 years of moving pictures about Holmes and Watson.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gardnerhill](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/gifts).



> My deepest thanks to my collaborator and source-monkey, language-escapes, without whom this would have required twice the work and been half as good. Major thanks also to grrlpup, who watched many hours of source and many drafts of the vid, and to ghost-lingering, who provided excellent beta and technical advice. 
> 
> If you spot an error in the source list, please say so. I am especially uncertain that I have credited the correct actors for _Jighangsha_ (1951). If there’s anyone out there who can double-check against [the in-film credits](https://youtu.be/Db8Gsfk-luQ?t=1m15s) (which are in Bengali script), that would be a great boon, thank you.
> 
> Originally posted at [Holmestice](http://holmestice.livejournal.com/409720.html). Also on [tumblr](http://sanguinarysanguinity.tumblr.com/post/146379373743/something-good-will-come-from-that-100-years-of).
> 
> Streaming, download, sources, and lyrics below; commentary in subsequent chapters.

[Something Good (Will Come From That)](https://vimeo.com/171431158) from [Sanguinity](https://vimeo.com/user221625) on [Vimeo](https://vimeo.com).

[Download](https://www.dropbox.com/s/zj6m54rlthqfxrm/Something%20Good%20-%20H%26W%20multi%20-%20sanguinity.mp4?dl=0) (.mp4, 65MB) 

**Sources**  


Audio:

  1. “Would You Like to Take a Walk?” (ca. 1930), The Sunshine Boys 
  2. The BBC Complete Audio Sherlock Holmes (1989-1998), Clive Merrison & Michael Williams



Video:

  1. Sherlock Holmes (1916), William Gillette & Edward Fielding 
  2. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1921), Eille Norwood & Hubert Willis 
  3. Sherlock Holmes (1922), John Barrymore & Roland Young 
  4. The Sleeping Cardinal | Sherlock Holmes’ Fatal Hour (1931), Arthur Wontner & Ian Fleming 
  5. The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes (1935), Arthur Wontner & Ian Fleming 
  6. Silver Blaze | Murder at the Baskervilles (1937), Arthur Wontner & Ian Fleming 
  7. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939), Basil Rathbone & Nigel Bruce 
  8. Pursuit to Algiers (1945), Basil Rathbone & Nigel Bruce 
  9. জিঘাংসা (Jighangsha) | Revenge (1951), Sisir Batabyal and Biman Banerjee 
  10. Sherlock Holmes (1954-1955), Ronald Howard & Howard Marion Crawford 
  11. Sherlock Holmes und das Halsband des Todes | Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962), Christopher Lee & Thorley Walters 
  12. Sherlock Holmes (1965), Douglas Wilmer & Nigel Stock 
  13. Sherlock Holmes (1968), Peter Cushing & Nigel Stock 
  14. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), Robert Stephens & Colin Blakely 
  15. They Might Be Giants (1971), George C. Scott & Joanne Woodward 
  16. Собака Баскервилей | The Hound of the Baskervilles (1971), Nikolay Volkov & Lev Krugliy 
  17. The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976), Nicol Williamson & Robert Duvall 
  18. Murder By Decree (1979), Christopher Plummer & James Mason 
  19. Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson (1979-1980), Geoffrey Whitehead & Donald Pickering 
  20. Приключения Шерлока Холмса и доктора Ватсона | The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (1979-1986), Vasiliy Livanov & Vitali Solomin 
  21. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1982), Tom Baker & Terence Rigby 
  22. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1984-1985), Jeremy Brett & David Burke 
  23. 名探偵ホームズ | Sherlock Hound (1984-1985), Taichirō Hirokawa & Kōsei Tomita 
  24. Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), Nicholas Rowe & Alan Cox 
  25. The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1986-1988), Jeremy Brett & Edward Hardwicke 
  26. The Great Mouse Detective (1986), Barrie Ingham & Val Bettin 
  27. Мой нежно любимый детектив | My Dearly Beloved Detective (1986), Yekaterina Vasilyeva & Galina Shchepetnova 
  28. Without a Clue (1988), Michael Caine & Ben Kingsley 
  29. Star Trek: The Next Generation: Elementary, My Dear Data (1988), Brent Spiner & LeVar Burton 
  30. 1994 Baker Street: Sherlock Holmes Returns (1993), Anthony Higgins & Debrah Farentino 
  31. 福尔摩斯与中国女侠 | Sherlock Holmes in China (1994), Alex Vanderpor & Zhongquan Xu 
  32. Wishbone: The Slobbery Hound, A Dogged Exposé (1995), Soccer & Ric Spiegel 
  33. The Adventures of Shirley Holmes (1996-1999), Meredith Henderson & John White 
  34. Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century (1999-2001), Jason Gray-Stanford & John Payne 
  35. O Xangô de Baker Street | The Xango of Baker Street (2001), Joaquim de Almeida & Anthony O'Donnell 
  36. Veggie Tales: Sheerluck Holmes and the Golden Ruler (2006), Mike Nawrocki & Phil Vischer 
  37. Sherlock Holmes (2009), Robert Downey Jr. & Jude Law 
  38. Sherlock Holmes (2010), Ben Syder & David Gareth-Lloyd 
  39. Sherlock (2010- ), Benedict Cumberbatch & Martin Freeman 
  40. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), Robert Downey Jr. & Jude Law 
  41. Sherlock Holmes Nevében | In the Name of Sherlock Holmes (2011), Kristof Szenasi & Adam Ungvar 
  42. Elementary (2012- ), Jonny Lee Miller & Lucy Liu 
  43. 221B Baker Towers (as [visualised by mind-tardis](https://vimeo.com/43643746), 2012), John Boyega & Leeon Jones 
  44. По горячим следам | In Hot Pursuit (2013), Molly Metaphora & Liru-chan 
  45. Шерлок Холмс | Sherlock Holmes (2013), Igor Petrenko & Andrey Panin 
  46. 셜록홈즈: 앤더슨가의 비밀 | Sherlock Holmes: The Secret of the Anderson Family (2014 revival), Song Yong-jin & Park Hye-na 
  47. Sherlock Holmes & John Watson: Break Free (2014), Frogwares 
  48. Baker Street 221B (2014), Ícaro Silva & Fábio Cardoso 
  49. The Adventures of Jamie Watson and Sherlock Holmes (2014- ), Shannen Michaelson & Sara-Renee Weatherby 
  50. Herlock (2015), Gia Mora & Alana Jordan 
  51. Baker Street (2015- ), Hannah Drew & Karen Slater 
  52. Mister Holmes (2015), Ian McKellen with Nicholas Rowe 
  53. A Study in Charlotte (2016), Emma Pfaeffle & Matt Rosell 
  54. S(her)lock (2016- ), Helen Davies & Lisa Bunker



**Lyrics**

I saw you strolling by your solitary  
Am I nosy? Very very!  
I’d like to bet a juicy huckleberry  
What you’re after is a boy  
We’re both in luck for introductions are not necessary…

Mm-mm-mm, would you like to take a walk?  
Mm-mm-mm, do you think it’s gonna rain?  
Mm-mm-mm, how about a sarsparilla?  
Gee, the moon is yellow!  
Something good will come from that.

Mm-mm-mm, have you heard the latest song?  
Mm-mm-mm, it’s a very pretty strain.  
Mm-mm-mm, don’t you feel a little thrilly?  
Gee, it’s getting chilly!  
Something good will come from that!

When you’re strolling through the where-sis  
You need a who-sis to lean upon  
When you have no who-sis  
To hug and what-sis  
Dog-gone!

Mm-mm-mm, would you like to take a walk?  
Mm-mm-mm, do you think it’s gonna rain?  
Mm-mm-mm, aren’t you tired of the talkies?  
I prefer the walkies  
Something good will come from that.

Walking and talking with a girl like you  
Is about the sweetest thing any boy can do  
I’d rather be romancing than walking, dear  
I’d rather be dancing… Oh, let’s dance here.

Doot-doo-doo, have you heard the song of spring?  
Doot-doo-doo, you can hear it everywhere.  
Doot-doo-doo, when you see the little roses  
Turning up their noses  
Something good will come from that.

Mm-mm-mm, when you see a butterfly  
Mm-mm-mm, nodding to a buttercup  
Mm-mm-mm, when you hear a little cricket  
Chirping in the thicket  
Something good will come from that.

Oh, say, I'd love to be your who-sis  
We could go where-sis most every night  
We could love and what-sis  
You’d find your who-sis just right.

Doot-doo-doot-doo-doo, take a walk in lover’s lane  
Doot-doo-doot-doo-doo, then you’ll hear that song of spring  
Doot-doo-doot-doo-doo, when you hear those lovers sighing  
Then there’s no denying  
Something good will come from that!  
...and that!  
...and that!


	2. Commentary

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Commentary originally posted at [DW](http://sanguinity.dreamwidth.org/132627.html) / [LJ](http://sanguinity.livejournal.com/669338.html).

For the past year I've been watching a LOT of Holmes and Watson while trying not to say too much about any of it in public. (I was allegedly ‘preserving my anonymity,’ hah! I needn’t have bothered; the **holmestice** comm seems to have known more-or-less instantly who made that vid.)  
  
So here, have a bunch of random, pent-up commentary, with numerous digressions and side-notes. :-)  
  
**A Year Spent Watching Holmes and Watson**  
  
A little over a year ago, [gardnerhill](http://gardnerhill.livejournal.com/) signed up for Holmestice with a vid-friendly request for any adaptation of Holmes and Watson. I immediately emailed[language_escapes](http://language-escapes.dreamwidth.org/) with an idea I had already been turning over, one that I really wanted to do but couldn’t pull off without her help: as many versions of Holmes and Watson walking arm-in-arm as I could find, set to a pop song from the 1920s called “Would You Like To Take a Walk?”  
  
Happily, she was as excited about the idea as I was. We didn’t wait for assignments to be made, but began furiously brainstorming that very day. After all, Holmestice has a quick deadline, and we would need every single day we could finagle.  
  
A week or two later assignments came out, and I matched on someone else.  
  
It was a stroke of luck, really. I have no doubt that whatever we would have made during that six weeks would have been charming, but Lang and I had a Vision -- a Vision already forty sources deep in our Spreadsheet of Doom! -- and we would need a lot more prep time for it.  
  
We spent a little more than a year on it, as it turned out. On and off, of course, nothing like full time for either of us, because there are other things in our lives. But still, for a year, we’ve been brainstorming and watching things and making notes and looking at gifsets and googling up ever-more-obscure adaptations and tracking down source and watching more things and making even _more_ notes.  
  
Let me just say, first: if you value your quality of life, don’t ever attempt something like this without someone like Lang at your back. Lang is a voracious and passionate consumer of all things Sherlock Holmes and doesn’t have much regard for whether something is allegedly good or terrible, which means that not only has she heard of nearly everything, but she’s seen a good chunk of it and knows which parts Didn’t Suck. Even more importantly, she is a _stage manager._ I cannot tell you how many times I gave thanks during this past year for that skillset. Communicative, organized, logistically minded, a strong eye for visual design, and the ability to take someone else’s ~Artistic Vision~ and methodically bang through the tasks necessary to make it a reality. She sunk a _ton_ of labor into this vid. The main reason I finally sat down and made the thing is because I didn’t want to let her down, not after all the time she had invested in it.  
  
(She watched nearly all of Rathbone and Bruce for me. All of Sheldon Reynold’s 1954 TV series. All of Sheldon Reynold’s _second_ TV series, the 1979 one. The entirety of the Adventures of Jamie Watson webseries -- and she did _that_ the week the vid was due, while she was working on her own Holmestice assignment. I’d say in despair, “Cushing, _Cushing_ should be in here, I haven’t watched any _Cushing_ ,” and she’d watch some Cushing for me. Every time I couldn’t cope with the sheer volume of source sitting out there staring at me, she’d sit down with pen, paper, and a youtube screen, and knock down the size of the remaining task by another two to twenty hours. Furthermore, she’s the one who found the Korean source, both Brazillian sources, who reminded me that 221B Baker Towers exists and pointed me towards some of the F/F webseries I hadn’t known about. She came up with a good half of the original vid-outline, and she talked me off of more than one ledge. She declined co-author credit, but please know: she was very much my collaborator, and had a huge influence on how the vid turned out.)  
  
And while I’m thanking people: [grrlpup](http://grrlpup.dreamwidth.org/) watched a _lot_ of Holmes with me this past year. (“What TV are we watching tonight?” I’d ask, and she’d return, “Do you have anything you need to watch for the vid?” _Why, yes. Yes, I do._ ) She, too, has been bumping adaptations in my direction -- she found the _Study in Charlotte_ book-trailer for me, when I was wondering if I’d find anything with a 2016 production date -- and was always available and eager to review my daily drafts. ghost_lingering provided technical know-how at the beginning, beta at the end, and enthusiasm in the middle. I also drew upon the work of many gif-makers of tumblr (whose names I didn’t think to document), who collectively highlighted parallels across adaptations and as good as did my source review for _Elementary_ and Granada. Plus there were a _ton_ of people -- some of whom knew I was working on the vid, and many of whom didn’t -- who answered questions about adaptations and episodes and where to find source or how to do something-or-other… Not to mention all the people who build and publish lists upon lists upon lists about all things Sherlock Holmes. There are so many kinds of fan labor that go into something like this! Making the vid was a ton of work, but it was much, _much_ easier than it might have been, because I had a thriving fan community to draw upon.  
  
**ALL THE HOLMESES and ALL THE WATSONS**  
  
When we sat down to make this vid, we hoped to showcase the great, turbulent sea of ideas that is Holmesiana. The way creators keep coming back to canon before darting off in some new direction again; the truly _weird_ shit that sometimes pops up; the serious questions posed about race, gender, era, and place; the cross-talk and homages and throw-downs; and the way that despite all this, all of these myriad people (and vegetables and robots and mice and dogs) still manage to somehow be recognizably Holmes and Watson.  
  
And, of course, we wanted to share our own ridiculous delight in that great noisy mess.  
  
Personally, I consider this vid to be only moderately successful on the first point. (Actually, I consider it to be an epic failure on that point, but I know I’m being melodramatic.) I’ve seen the vid described a few times now as ALL THE HOLMESES and ALL THE WATSONS, which both fills me with pride and sends me into a giggle-fits of despair. It is at best a decent sampling of some of my favorite Holmeses and Watsons, plus a few more who were or are fan-favorites, plus a handful who made me laugh that one time, plus several more whom I haven’t met properly but would probably enjoy getting to know better someday, plus a few who suggest how many kinds of people in how many places have had something they wanted to say about Holmes and Watson. And then one or two more about whom I have exactly zero opinions, but who supplied the exact bridging shot I needed for some sequence.  
  
...which sounds pretty impressive, even I can admit that. But set against the sheer, ridiculous, volume of Holmesiana out there?  
  
Take _The Hound of the Baskervilles_. Wikipedia [currently lists twenty-five film and TV adaptations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hound_of_the_Baskervilles#Film_and_television_adaptations). I have at least twenty versions of HOUN on my hard-drives right now: eighteen that are listed in the article, plus another two that slipped past the Wikipedia editors. Of these twenty-seven known-to-me adaptations, twenty of which I have in my hands, only eleven are directly or indirectly represented in the vid. (Indirect representation would be things like _Elementary_ , _Sherlock_ , and the Norwood films: their versions of HOUN aren’t in the vid, but the larger production is.)  
  
Eleven out of twenty-seven is far from a miserable showing. But among the ‘serious’ adaptations (for incredibly arbitrary values of ‘serious’), that’s about what it looks like. For example, Peter Cushing had three goes at Holmes (1959, 1968, 1984), each opposite a different Watson. Only the 1968 pairing with Nigel Stock is in the vid; Cushing’s other two Watsons are entirely absent. (I enjoyed the 1959 Watson, André Morell, and would have liked to include him. I know nothing about the 1984 production: it’s sitting on my hard-drive, not yet watched.) Or take Thorley Waters, who played Watson opposite four Holmeses, twice ‘seriously’ and twice as comedy. Waters is in the vid opposite Christopher Lee, while two more of Waters’ Holmeses (Christopher Plummer and Douglas Wilmer) are in the vid opposite _other_ Watsons (James Mason and Nigel Stock, respectively). Waters’ fourth Holmes is entirely absent. And since I mentioned Christopher Lee, Lee’s _other_ Watson, Patrick MacNee -- who played Watson opposite two Holmeses and Holmes opposite two Watsons! -- isn’t in the vid at all. And so it goes.  
  
I submit that we made a valiant attempt at getting a strong sampling of productions into the vid, and I think we were moderately successful. But I also submit that we didn’t even approach ‘every imaginable Holmes and Watson.’ Because once you get down past all the adapts that are notable enough to have been mentioned in some Wikipedia article or other (and let’s face it, most of the things mentioned in Wikipedia aren’t in the vid), you get into [this _beast_ of a 45-page pdf](http://sherlocktron.com/SH_Films.pdf), which is a heroic and yet still incomplete attempt to document every single time someone put on a deerstalker for thirty seconds and called themselves Holmes. Of course, a lot of that list has no business being in the vid: frankly, much of it is crap or doesn’t have a Watson. (Veggie Tales aside, I do have some standards.) But some in there, like [Sherlock Hemlock](http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Sherlock_Hemlock) of _Sesame Street_ fame, are iconic in their own way and were candidates for the vid.  
  
(I regret not having any Muppets in the vid. I looked at an assortment of Sherlock Hemlock clips, but it was always late at night, and there’s a ton of them, and I never saw one of decent quality before I’d give up and go to bed. Lang and I both really _really_ wanted to get [Whale!Holmes](https://youtu.be/PcaqjhsN0Lk?t=7m32s) into the vid, but I just couldn’t make the comic timing work. And by the time I realized that Whale!Holmes wasn’t going in, the timeline was mostly filled out and I had no good place to put [Rowlf!Holmes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU27gd34R-I). The ‘obvious’ place would be where the second Wishbone clip is, of course, but that devolves into a debate about the relative comic merits of live-action and puppet dogs, and... Welcome to the obsessive nonsense that has been my life this past year.)  
  
But our other goal was to share our own ridiculous delight in the great, noisy, chaotic mess of Holmesiana. That seems to have been a wild success.  
  
So, while I’m disappointed that various things aren’t in the vid ([the Japanese puppets](https://www.viki.com/tv/27556c-sherlock-holmes-puppet-entertainment)! Ace Attorney’s [Iris Watson](http://aceattorney.wikia.com/wiki/Iris_Watson)!) and I’m absolutely sure I’m going to spend the next year having intermittent bouts of AGH THAT SHOULD HAVE GONE IN THE VID... I’m still pretty pleased with it all.  
  
**100 Years of Moving Pictures**  
  
This is just to say: I am very much aware that Sherlock Holmes film-and-tv fandom didn’t begin with Gillette. The original notion, believe it or not, was to include both still and moving pictures, and to have the retrospective reach all the way back to Paget and his colleagues.  
  
However, still images demand a different workflow than moving ones, and I when I began building the timeline I realized that I desperately needed to hack the project back to quasi-manageable size. So all the still images went away. Sadly, that means a lot of cool stuff isn’t in the vid: Paget (and everyone riffing on Paget!), _Watson and Holmes_ , _Baker Street: Honour Among Punks_ , Kate Beaton... Bye, sorry. Maybe we can have lunch sometime. :-/  
  
Getting rid of still pictures slid my earliest date forward to 1900, “[Sherlock Holmes Baffled](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes_Baffled).” Originally I was gonna use one of the Holmes-and-Watson-go-to-the-cinema scenes ( _They Might Be Giants_ , _My Dearly Beloved Detective_ ) with some video-editing magic to have Holmes and Watson watching “Baffled.” But then someone sent a _Mr. Holmes_ gifset across my dash in which an elderly Holmes watches a talkies-era movie Holmes, who is played by the actor who had once played _Young Sherlock Holmes_ , and the emotional resonance of that was just too lovely to pass up. Good-bye, “Baffled.”  
  
(Besides, it’s not like “Baffled” has a Watson. It isn’t even really about Sherlock Holmes; it’s about the exciting new era of special effects.)  
  
So with “Baffled” out of the mix, my earliest date floated amorphously between 1900 and 1916 while I hunted through the earlier part of the silent era for good stuff. (The Gillette had just been found! It would be restored and re-released soon!) Sadly, it turned out that while [a _ton_ of silent films were made about Sherlock Holmes](https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php?title=Conan_Doyle_on_screen#Sherlock_Holmes_as_main_character), most of them haven’t survived, aren’t generally accessible, or don’t include Watson. (The Georges Tréville films from 1912 are typically credited as having a Watson, but “Copper Beeches” is the only one easy to lay hands on, and I watched that sucker from one end to the other and never saw a Watson.) All said and done, the earliest source I could find that included a Watson was the 1916 Gillette.  
  
...and by then, I had spent so long preparing to make the vid, it was 2016 already.  
  
So there it was: potentially a round century, provided anyone released anything in 2016 that I could use. Happily, the publishers of _A Study in Charlotte_ dropped [a book trailer](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjIJFW8Uetw) in March, and while it was only two and a half minutes long and covered with text, there were three usable clips from it. That was _plenty._ Some of my other sources didn’t offer even that much flexibility.  
  
(Later, building the credit list, I discovered that I needn’t have worried: _S(her)lock_ officially has a 2016 release date, never mind that I’ve seen several rough-cut episodes over the last year or so.)  
  
**100 Years of Cinematography**  
  
Like any vidder, I’m moderately fluent in the contemporary cinematographic idiom: how shots are composed, how pans and zooms and dissolves are used and what they’re meant to convey, how scenes are built from standard patterns of shots, etc. Obvs, there’s a lot of artistic leeway in these things -- as well as significant budgetary constraints! -- but there is still a coherent and consistent _idiom_ in modern TV and cinema.  
  
...and I’ve gotta say, it was _fascinating_ watching that modern idiom develop.  
  
For example, in the very earliest films I looked at, there was essentially no concept of cinema being a distinct medium from a play: the camera sat in a fixed position just beyond the fourth wall, and the only time the shot changed was when it was time to change sets.  
  
By the 1916 Gillette, the filmmaker was cross-cutting between two locations to signify simultaneous action (for example, between a victim and his rescuers), confident that the audience could follow. However, cutting _within_ a scene, between a full and medium shot of the same subjects, _without_ a time- or location-jump, required a dissolve between the full and the medium shots: the pre-cursor of a zoom or dolly shot. (For myself, I found that dissolve persistently disorienting: in the current idiom, a dissolve is used to indicate a significant jump in time or place. I kept thinking we were dissolving to _somewhere else_ , but nope, we’re still here, having the same conversation we were just having.)  
  
By the early twenties, the faux-zoom / continuity-dissolve had disappeared, and they were just butting long, medium, and close shots up against each other like we do now. That’s when I finally started to see over-the-shoulder shots, although I didn’t see them much: I got the feeling they were an expensive hassle to produce. Even through the end of the 1930s and into Rathbone-Bruce they were largely reserved for emotional climaxes. (F’rex, in the 1937 Wontner/Fleming film, _Silver Blaze_ , most conversations are conducted everyone standing together in the same frame. But when the filmmaker got to the big finish: [Watson and Moriarty facing off! Death threat! Last-minute rescue! With frequent cuts between everyone’s faces!](https://youtu.be/dXgeMsENlHk?t=1h2m33s))  
  
You can also see the improvements in camera technology over the course of these films, as zooms, pans, and shifting focuses became available. (Hey, while we’re talking about developing camera technology, have another example from the 1937 _Silver Blaze_ : [a super-exciting revolve-o-cam shot of Watson lounging on a table like a torch singer, listening to Holmes deduce](https://youtu.be/dXgeMsENlHk?t=42m03s).) Similarly, I got to be able to spot when color was new and exciting for a particular distribution channel: there’s a certain enthusiasm for jewel tones before everyone gets jaded and ‘realistic’ about it. You see it in the Peter Cushing 1959 Hammer Films _Hound of the Baskervilles_ (which didn’t make it into the vid, as so many, many things didn’t); you see it in the Cushing 1968 TV series with his [marvelously purple dressing-gown](http://sanguinarysanguinity.tumblr.com/post/146829220313/peter-cushing-and-nigel-stock-the-blue); you see it in the original 1979 Russian TV series and Livanov’s gorgeous burgundy suit. (For reference, Hammer’s _Hound_ is the first full-color Holmesian production; British television went to color in 1967, the year before Cushing’s remarkable purple dressing gown; the Soviet Union went to color in 1976.)  
  
Those big changes in technology, idiom, and style introduced their own set of challenges to making the vid. Visually, my collection of sources is a gawdawful, chaotic mess, and it only got worse after the various kinds of source degradation and the inclusion of cartoons. [charmax](http://charmax.dreamwidth.org/)managed her multi-decade diversity of source in [Space Girl](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-y8BjwzJSo) by organizing the vid by era, and I think that would make for a _fascinating_ Holmesian vid. There are some major era-to-era trends that show up, not just stylistically, but in content and characterization, too.  
  
However, for this vid, I went a different way, and concentrated on matching shot content, movement, and composition. Holmes and Watson themselves may change radically from one shot to the next, but where I could, I tried to hold constant where they are in the frame and what they’re doing. Hopefully that also helped people ride out the ever-changing cast: I don’t expect most viewers would know every single last one of these Holmeses and Watsons, and I wanted to give as many cues as possible about what's going on, given how briefly we cut in and out of some of these adaptations.  
  
As it turned out, matching shots was far easier to accomplish than I expected: I had _so much source_ to choose from, and at a first approximation, they’re all telling the same story. Obviously, you’ve got adaptations like Norwood, Original Russian, Granada, and the Cushing/Wilmer BBC series, all of which stay relatively close to the original canon: I could cut from Granada’s BLUE to Cushing’s BLUE with barely a blip. But even among adaptations that stray much farther from canon -- _22nd Century_ , the Ritchie films, _BBC Sherlock_ \-- some storylines are remarkably constant. For example, while building the Reichenbach Supercut I realized there’s only two substantial variations on Reichenbach: whether or not Watson has a sightline on the fall. Similarly with the Return: the only real variation is whether Watson is a hugger or a puncher. I had originally thought that supercut was going to be a wild mess of disparate times and places, but in the end, those were the only two decisions I had to make. The rest of it was simply deciding which production was clearest for which moments, and trusting that the viewer knows enough about Reichenbach to follow as we slide out of one adaptation and into the next.  
  
(That said, I _very strongly do not advise_ watching six Reichenbachs back-to-back over the course of a single morning. Lang, of course, just sat over there on the other side of the continent, well away from any Reichenbach-playing video screen, and laughed at me. I seem to recall her spending a lot of time laughing at me while I was editing the vid.)  
  
**Cinematography and Shippiness**  
  
Going back to changing cinematography: at one point Lang and I were commenting about how handsy so many of the pre-1970 productions were: in a number of them, Holmes and Watson touch each other _all the time_. (Not universally, of course: Rathbone and Bruce are fairly standoffish with each other.) I’m not well-versed in film history, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to believe that the handsiness drop-off during the 1970s and 80s was a homophobic societal response to the gay liberation movement. However, I wonder how much the [4:3 frame](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_\(image\)#4:3_standard) contributed to all that handsiness being there in the first place. After all, when you’re filming in 4:3 and you want a moderately close-in shot with both Holmes and Watson in the frame, you either have to offset them from each other, one near to the camera and one farther away (there are a lot of violin-playing shots like that, presumably because the violin takes up so much lateral space) or you need to have the actors standing nearly on each other’s toes. (In Wontner/Fleming, from the 1930s, they’re often sitting on the arm of each other’s chairs. It’s very charming: Watson enters a room and walks right past several empty chairs to share Holmes’ chair with him.) Of course, snugging the actors up like that for the 4:3 frame puts them within ready touching distance, so you’re going to end up with more handsiness simply as an acting choice. But I suspect that touching is functional, too: it allows the actors to keep track of where their co-star is, helping them maintain that close-enough-for-the-shot distance without them physically tripping on each other.  
  
Whatever the reasons for it, the effect is extraordinarily slashy. There’s a shot in the 1968 Cushing/Stock _Hound_ , in which Cushing and Stock are talking on one side of a great, cavernous room, and then cross together to the opposite side. Cushing keeps his hands on Stock the whole way across that great, open, empty space, nearly as if they’re ballroom dancing. (I tried to fit that clip into the dancing montage, but it’s not quite marked enough to live there.) Presumably Cushing is touching Stock that whole distance because that production never had rehearsal time -- the 1965/1968 BBC production was legendary for their lack of rehearsals -- and physically guiding Stock across the room is a relatively effective way to keep the two of them from going down in a tangle, especially since Stock was walking backwards for part of the distance. And yet the visual effect is of a Holmes and Watson so attached at the hip that they cannot even cross an empty room without clinging to each other the whole way.  
  
And while I’m talking about camera frames, physical proximity of the actors, and the effect on apparent shippiness: one of the things you constantly hear as an _Elementary_ fan (and always from people who don’t watch the show, it’s very trying), is the charge that Watson was cast female in an act of homophobia, in order to facilitate a het romance between Holmes and Watson. That charge might be fair for something like _They Might Be Giants_ , which has explicitly romantic scenes of Holmes and Watson dancing by candlelight. (I didn’t use _Giants_ in the dancing montage because I didn’t want to get into that whole it’s-okay-if-they’re-straight issue, especially not against the HAHAHAGAY of the Ritchie films and the Frogwares April Fools short.) But as someone who just finished making a multiverse Holmes/Watson slashvid, I can say with good authority: the people filming _Elementary_ are doing everything in their power to kill any shippy visual subtext. At times I felt like I was in a pitched battle with the people filming the show. For example, I can’t think of any shots of Miller and Liu walking along together physically bumping shoulders, not in over seventy hours of footage, and the gif-makers don’t seem to have found any either. They always maintain a substantial chunk of space between them when they’re walking. (Sure, they have a tendency to drift toward each other while they walk, but I can’t hang a vid on five-second shots where they begin three feet apart and finish two feet apart.) Furthermore, Miller’s and Liu’s intimate h/c-style scenes tend to be filmed as long shots -- even inside the brownstone, long shots! -- with a tiny, tiny Holmes and Watson positioned a very, very long way away from the camera. (That blue carbuncle ‘proposal’ shot in the vid? I zoomed way in on that. Same with them sharing an umbrella.) Miller and Liu are markedly more standoffish than Rathbone and Bruce, and that is saying something, as we had the worst time finding intimate, affectionate shots for Rathbone and Bruce. If Liu was cast to facilitate a het romance, somebody _seriously_ needs to send the directors and camera-people a memo about it.  
  
And seeing that I’ve wound my way around to _Elementary_...  
  
**Gender and Race, oh my!**

 **(** ETA: [Sources with a female Holmes or a female Watson, timestamped by first appearance](http://sanguinarysanguinity.tumblr.com/post/146515537413/quirkygown-swissmissficrecs))

Lang and I being the kinds of Holmesians we are, we both wanted to get a decent chunk of racial and gender diversity into the vid. Certainly one of the things I love about the size of the overarching Holmesian fandom is that there are a significant number of people playing with gender and race, asking if Holmes and Watson always have to be white-male-cis-English, and what it looks like when they’re not.  
  
As it turned out, racial and gender diversity were a battle to get into the vid in any significant amount. There’s just not that much footage, and a lot of it was filmed under severe budget restrictions or isn’t in great shape.  
  
For example, to my intense chagrin, I realized late in the game that the iconic ‘walking and talking’ shot that I organized the vid around is a fairly expensive shot to produce: very few of the webseries have it. (I am impressed forever that the makers of “[In Hot Pursuit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-Iiy7Qx_C0)” managed it, outdoors, in period dress, _twice_.) In fact, many of the things that the webseries producers do to manage production costs made it difficult for me to pull their footage into the vid as fully as I would have liked. For a while, I despaired of including _[Herlock](http://herlock.us/)_ at all, because there is _exactly one shot_ in the entire thing where Sheridan and Jonny share the frame; elsewhere, they interact via video chat. (Even worse for my purposes, that one shot is their first in-person meeting, so their body-language is a bit weird and standoffish, exactly the opposite of what I was looking for. Fortunately, I had the ridiculously late epiphany that _I already had a sequence of first-ish meetings_ , a sequence in which Holmes’ and Watson’s body-language already ran toward weird and standoffish.) And so it went with many of the other webseries, too. I am in no way slamming the webseries producers: I sincerely admire the ingenuity required to make good things on lean budgets, and if that means I in turn had to be more resourceful to bring their footage into the vid, then so be it. But I can’t help but wish they had more money to work with to tell their stories.  
  
Across the board, lack of money was a fairly prominent issue among productions with a female Holmes and/or Watson. There just aren’t that many productions with women or girls; a good chunk of what does exist was made without a studio or network budget; and the adaptations that did manage to swing a professionally-sized budget during production were mostly left to moulder on VHS afterwards. Putting aside _Elementary_ (which is a huge outlier), there are a half-dozen movies and one TV show with a female Watson; of all those, only Joanne Woodward, _They Might Be Giants_ , has made the jump to DVD.  
  
(Taken against that dismal history, Lucy Liu is having a frankly _astonishing_ run as Watson. In fact, she’s having an impressively long run for any Watson, of any race or gender. Lucy Liu has already logged a little more than seventy hours as Watson, neatly twice that of her nearest screen contender, Edward Hardwicke. Most of the other long-running screen Watsons -- Nigel Bruce, Howard Marion-Crawford, Nigel Stock, John White -- come in around twenty hours. In fact, Liu’s track record is significant even among the radio Watsons, although she still has a good way to go to catch up to Nigel Bruce’s frankly staggering combined screen and radio hours.)  
  
(BTW, if you didn’t know who John White was in that last paragraph, he played opposite Meredith Henderson in _The Adventures of Shirley Holmes,_ a small-budget Canadian children’s series that never made it to DVD. As near as I can tell, Meredith Henderson was the first and only screen female Holmes with a male Watson. IMO, they’re a solid Holmes and Watson pair with a satisfying dynamic; the only reason they’re not in the vid more is because the cinematography is fairly crap and the VHS rips are worse.)  
  
For racial diversity, the situation was different in its particulars, although it came to a similar result in terms of how much footage is in the vid.  
  
Again setting aside Elementary (which is _still_ an enormous outlier!), there simply isn’t much racial diversity among anglophone productions, not even among the webseries. The most prominent ‘verse with a chromatic Holmes or Watson is the comic _Watson and Holmes_ , and then after that… Well, there isn’t much. The next in line might be _[221B Baker Towers](http://221b-baker-towers.tumblr.com/about)_ , which rather shows exactly how lean the field is, because _221B Baker Towers_ is a source-less open universe. (Happily, 221BBT fandom has [at least one vidder](http://mindtardis.tumblr.com/tagged/221b-baker-towers), and that was more than enough for me to run with.) In English-language sources, most of what Lang and I found were single episodes within larger non-Holmesian series, scenarios where the regular characters take on the roles of Holmes and Watson for a brief while. Geordi of _Star Trek_ is one such character, as is Gus of _Psych._ Data and Geordi fit very nicely into the song’s verse about someone happily playing a Watson to a Holmes (and vice-versa!), but as much as I wanted to slip Gus into the vid somewhere -- [his in-episode questions about why Holmes can’t sometimes be Jamaican](http://politedemon.tumblr.com/post/143691919223) are on-point and thematically relevant! -- I never found a way to make the visuals of him in a deerstalker work. :-/  
  
However, where the anglophone productions had little to offer with respect to racial diversity, the non-anglophone productions often had much more. At the very least, there’s an Azerbaijani film, two South Asian adaptations of _Hound of the Baskervilles_ , several Chinese films (depending on what one counts as belonging to the fold of Holmes and Watson), a major Korean musical and its sequel… There _are_ chromatic Holmeses and Watsons out there; they’re just not in English. (Lang was much better at finding them than I was; I think at one point she was working her way down a list of countries, googling each country name plus ‘sherlock holmes’, looking to see what surfaced. I commend her strength of resolve to dig beyond the various language-dubs of RDJ and Cumberbatch.)  
  
Once we found these non-anglophone chromatic productions, however, many were an awkward fit for the schema of the vid. When anglophone productions transplant Holmes and Watson to the producer’s home turf, they almost always keep Holmes and Watson as sympathetic point-of-view characters, but the non-anglophone productions are markedly less likely to do that. ( _Sherlock Holmes in China_ , as near as I can tell, is set against the backdrop of the opium wars, and both Holmes and Watson are a bit… ridiculous. Holmes seems to have an opium habit, and he routinely gets his ass kicked for trying to pass as Chinese.) Sherlock Holmes, like the British Empire, has reached far and wide around the world. Also like the British Empire, he isn’t beloved everywhere. The two Gillette-based productions aside, everything I put in the vid agree that Holmes and Watson are a matched pair; not all of them agree that Holmes and Watson are pretty great.  
  
**‘Always’ 1895**  
  
So, I’d long known that _BBC Sherlock_ didn’t originate the idea of putting Holmes and Watson in contemporary dress; after all, Rathbone and Bruce fought Nazis together. What startled me during our source review, however, is that ‘always 1895’ is something that happened very late and very suddenly.  
  
From 1900 through 1946, Holmes and Watson are nearly universally in modern dress. At the beginning of the film era, ‘modern dress’ is not that marked: Edwardian hats and skirts, mostly. A few more cars and phones than you might expect. By the time you get into the 1920s, though, the hemlines have begun climbing and the cars are losing that boxy look. In 1931, Holmes and Moriarty sit down to review their history together, and we learn [they first crossed paths in 1928](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUzwMy0AZD0&feature=youtu.be&t=38m5s). In 1932, Sherlock Holmes is [inventing ray guns to use in high-speed car chases.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVXJwyjnRlI&feature=youtu.be&t=4m16s) I don’t know who [this lady is staying at Baskerville Hall in 1937](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrbMR9NZkVc&feature=youtu.be&t=21m10s), but I think we can all agree that was a modern dress production.  
  
I have no idea why the first two Rathbone films broke with that tradition; [the Wikipedia article talks about it as if](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes_%281939_film_series%29) the contemporary Nazi-fighting is the weird thing that needs explaining, not the Victorian setting of the first two films. But from 1900 to 1946, the Rathbone-Bruce _Hound_ and _Adventures_ were the only exceptions I saw to the notion that Sherlock Holmes was a timeless creature of the present-day.  
  
Then Starrett published the famous poem in 1942, and within a few years, something happened. I don’t know if it was a popular-demand thing or a Doyle estate thing, but after WWII finished, _everything_ but that one Bengali production was filmed in period dress. ( _Deadly Necklace_ in 1962 was meant to be modern-dress, but the Doyle estate nixed that idea partway through filming, which is why that film is such a hodge-podge mess of I-don’t-know-what-decade-this-is.) Starting around 1970 or so, you see the occasional contemporary-era production again, but even those strictly conform to the idea that Holmes and Watson are ‘always 1895,’ as they always provide an in-text explanation for being set outside the 19th century. (Variously: descendant, suspended animation, time-travel, mental patient who thinks he’s Holmes...) As near as I can tell, ‘always 1895’ held an iron grip on Holmesian productions until 2010, when _Sherlock_ reverted to the original style of having Holmes be the viewer’s contemporary.  
  
Speaking of _BBC Sherlock_...  
  
William Gillette cast a long, long shadow through the first third of the 20th century. If something was filmed before 1940 and called _Sherlock Holmes_ , it was almost certainly a remake or sequel to Gillette. That abruptly stopped with the Rathbone series. I found a couple filmed revivals of the original play during the latter part of the century, but Alice Faulkner, the OFC that Gillette created, seems to have completely disappeared after WWII. (And yet before that, everyone seemed to know Alice Faulkner was Sherlock Holmes’ girlfriend, just like everyone now seems to know that Holmes and Adler have always had a thing.)  
  
Bruce and Rathbone cast an even longer shadow. For decades, Bruce was the archetypal Watson, with his distinctive characterization popping up as late as the 1990s in _22nd Century_. Btw, Bruce’s Watson was very distinctive: the Watsons of the 1910s through 1930s tended to be young, handsome, stylish, and reasonably competent. That changed very suddenly in the latter half of the 20th century, when the dominant Watson ‘type’ became older, slower, heavy-set, and often a bit bumbling. Bruce’s Watson was so dominant that even Watsons that didn’t conform to his archetype often took time to pay him homage: Solomin from the original Russian series did a bumbling greenhouse scene in _The King of Blackmail_ that was much like the one Bruce did in _Adventures_ ; Jude Law, too, had his shout-outs to Nigel Bruce.  
  
(It’s harder for me to pick out homages to Rathbone, because his Holmes wasn’t as distinctive as Bruce’s Watson.)  
  
It’s early days yet, but it sure looks to me like _BBC Sherlock_ is already starting to cast a shadow of a similar magnitude to Gillette and Rathbone-Bruce.  
  
It all makes me very curious to know what the next fifty years of Holmesiana are going to look like. What the next things that ‘everyone knows’ are going to be, who the archetypal Holmes and Watson will be, and so on. There were a lot of surprises for me as I went through the last century’s-worth of Holmes/Watson productions, and I’m interested to know what someone with a long view back at the first half of the 21st century might end up being surprised about.  
  
**Would You Like to Take a Walk?**  
  
Oh, and one last thing: [amindamazed](http://amindamazed.livejournal.com/) [asked in Holmestice comments](http://holmestice.livejournal.com/409720.html?thread=3520632#t3520632) where the song came from.  
  
I’ve known the song at least since I was a teenager. (Self-taught from a songbook of hits of the 1920s and 1930s, if memory serves.) For years, it was a song that I’d use to invite [grrlpup](http://grrlpup.dreamwidth.org/)for a walk with me, or to express my joy at being on a walk with her. Later, when we got a dog, it was his let’s-go-for-a-walk song. (That severely cut back my ability to sing the song for my own pleasure, of course, but it made for an entertainingly dumb party trick. I’d hum that first _‘mm’_ and Louie’s ears would go up, full alert, and by the time I got to _‘would’_ he’d be flipping out for joy.) I haven’t sung the song all that much since Louie died, and I honestly can’t tell you what made me think to attach it to Holmes and Watson -- probably a gifset of them walking arm-in-arm, or one of the quotes from YELL or RESI -- but the simple, open pleasure of the song, the slight archness… It seemed a lovely fit for them.  
  
I wondered for a little while if this was going to be one of those vid-ideas that died for lack of finding the right cover, but I lucked out: this version is more up-tempo than most, the recording is fairly clean and bright, and it has some interesting lyrics that I haven’t heard in any other version. (Everything from ‘walking and talking with a girl like you’ onward -- including the roses, dancing, butterfly, and cricket -- seem unique to this version. They’re not in the sheet music, and I haven’t heard anyone else use them.) I had some initial concerns that the additional lyrics were too het, too romantic, but Lang reassured me that we’d be fine, and I think she was right. I certainly can’t now imagine making do without that ‘cricket’ lyric.  
  
But yeah, this is Louie’s song. Many times while I was building the timeline, grrlpup turned to me and wondered aloud what Louie’s reaction would have been to my playing the song over and over, three seconds at a time. (Would he have become desensitized? Would he have lost his everlasting mind? I have no idea. I do know that our randomly wandering around humming it because we’d gotten earwormed _again_ would have scored him lots of extra walks.) For a while, in tribute to Louie's memory, the vid's musical interlude was gonna be a montage of many, many Tobys capped by a crowning moment of Wishbone, but in the end I needed that space for other things.  
  
And yet I feel like some part of his joy in going for walks got itself into the vid anyway. And maybe a bunch of you caught a little bit of it, too. :-)


	3. tumblr ask: How we found our sources

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Response to [an ask on tumblr](http://sanguinarysanguinity.tumblr.com/post/146769310978/hi-i-loved-your-sherlock-holmes-video-how-did); reposted here for archival purposes.

> How did you find all of the earlier/more obscure adaptions?

An excellent question! I alluded to it in the commentary, but the actual process of finding sources was pretty all-over-the-place. There was a fair amount of standing back, eyeballing the thing, and saying, “You know what it doesn’t have…?” and then seeing if we could find something. We were nothing like thorough in our efforts, however, because Holmesiana is _big_  -- I’ll say that again before I’m done -- and our scope was ridiculously huge. (“Is it Holmes and Watson? Is there video? If yes/yes, drop it in the bucket of possibles and we’ll look at it later.”)

So, the short answer:

  * @language-escapes, my collaborator, has a reputation for liking all things Sherlock Holmes -- and I acquired a similar reputation while making this -- so sometimes people simply brought us cool stuff that they thought we’d like (yay for friends!);
  * meanwhile, I spent a lot of time looking at Sherlockian lists, because I’ve only been in the fandom for four years and knew jack-all about anything and was desperately playing catch-up;
  * meanwhile-meanwhile, @language-escapes spent a lot of time doing google searches to see what might turn up that even _she_  didn’t know about;
  * and once we found that a thing existed, I would search for it via its original language, as that was far more likely to turn up usable video.



The longer answer includes my favorite lists, a bunch of neat things we found that _didn’t_ go into the vid, some stuff that we presume is neat but never found video for (or never found _enough_ video for), and even more rambling about the making-of…

* * *

So, as I said in the [earlier commentary](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7286698/chapters/16723621), [@language-escapes](https://tmblr.co/myVlt-zGeHQrCgBM-5NWkig) is one of those people who knows and loves (nearly) all things Sherlock Holmes and has a sincere affection for the oddball stuff. Most of the original Spreadsheet of Doom is her work. She already knew [@221b-baker-towers](https://tmblr.co/mxrYP7h4VKu95to2eVX0CMw) and quite a few female-female web productions, and of course a slew of cartoons and things. Furthermore, she’s well-known to her friends as someone who loves all things Sherlock Holmes (and over this past year, I’ve acquired that same reputation among _my_ friends) so in addition to the stuff she already knew about, there were a fair number of people randomly bringing us things that they thought might interest us. Friends are _great_ about stuff like that. 

(Here, have some of the cool things that came to us via friends but which missed out being in the vid: [Sherlock Bones](http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/manga.php?id=15133), [Ace Attorney](http://aceattorney.wikia.com/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes), [Detective Pikachu](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KonKZlqznIg)… Look, this is so weird to say, but _most_ things we found didn’t end up in the vid. Holmesiana is  _big._ Like really, freaky, vertigo-inducing _huge._ )

Most of our more obscure sources, however, came from us deliberately searching things out. My main line of attack was the various lists people publish about Sherlock Holmes. Have some of the stronger ones and what I liked about them:

  * **[The Conan Doyle Enclyclopedia: Conan Doyle On Screen](https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php?title=Conan_Doyle_on_screen)**  
Excellent for the early silents and talkies (and if you click through on any listing, it’ll say which ones are lost, so that’s a _huge_ time-saver), and a pretty decent listing of the major non-anglophone films. The list gets thinner as you move away from ‘serious’ adaptations into webseries, but it’s being actively updated: two months ago it didn’t have all those youtube links.  
  

  * **[Sherlocktron: Checklist of Sherlock Holmes (and Holmes related) Films and Television Programs](http://sherlocktron.com/SH_Films.pdf)**  
50-page spreadsheet (published as a pdf) that attempts to capture every single time someone put on a deerstalker and called themselves Holmes for thirty seconds. It’s an impressive, heroic attempt at completeness (and the owners are actively updating it – the last time I looked at it, it was ‘only’ 45 pages), and yet I can still name a couple of things that aren’t on there. (God, this _fandom_ , I can’t _even._ ) That pdf is an absolute treasure trove of dreck and hidden awesome. If you want to know which _Sesame Street_ Sherlock Hemlock sketches had a Watson, that’s the place to go, but it’ll also tell you about incredibly random things, like the live-action chimpanzees.  
  

  * @tabbystardust’s **[Sherlock Holmes, film and tv adaptations, 1900-2013](http://tabbystardust.tumblr.com/post/42690585411) ** (aka the gender/animal/vegetable/robot infographic)  
Surprisingly helpful for breaking up the nearly-endless parade of white men in Victorian dress. There’s no source info for anything, but if you already know who the robot or veggies or whatnot were, you can cross-reference the infographic against the other lists to narrow in on who the graphic must be referring to. (Half the battle in these things is simply knowing something exists!)  
  

  * **[IMDB: Sherlock Holmes (Character)](http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0026631/?ref_=tt_cl_t1)**  
Good for catching minor web productions, especially those with a male Holmes. (Sadly, name variations like ‘Shirley,’ ‘Sheridan,’ and ‘Charlotte’ are mostly not on that page.) Grossly hit-and-miss for non-anglophone productions or anything more than fifty years old.  
  

  * **[No Place Like Holmes: Who’s on First? Not so Elementary](http://www.nplh.co.uk/sherlock-holmes-around-the-world.html)**  
A set of pdfs attempting to document the first person to play Sherlock Holmes in any given country, with video links as they exist. Includes screen, stage, and web productions, which makes it the only list I found with a scope similar to ours. (Most lists restrict themselves to film and TV, but we were also including web series, stage plays, and video games.) The Brazillian play,  _[Baker Street 221B](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-EADZkwA-M)_ , came from here.  
  

  * [**Wikipedia: The Hound of the Baskervilles - Adaptations**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hound_of_the_Baskervilles#Adaptations)  
Because of the ‘notability’ rule, which severely restricts what-all gets mentioned, I didn’t use Wikipedia for all that much beyond getting oriented with classic Holmesiana. However, HOUN has been adapted a kajillion times, many of them non-anglophone. The 1971 Russian _Hound of the Baskervilles_ came from this list, and the trail that eventually led to the Bengali _[Jighangsha](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db8Gsfk-luQ&feature=youtu.be)_  began here. (Well, for me, it did. It seems that @language-escapes independently found reference to  _Jighangsha_ , but she didn’t mention it to me because she couldn’t find source and I’d allegedly been feeling ‘overwhelmed.’)



So, I spent a lot of time looking at lists, trying to get a sense of what on them might be interesting. In the process, I watched a lot of dreck. And yet whenever I thought that I finally had a grip on what was out there, that I’d finally gotten down to the layer of unbroken, unmitigated, uninteresting  _crap_ that makes up the bottom chunk of anything…  _boom_ , I’d hit another gem. Believe it or not, I was still adding in new adaptations in the last days before the vid went live, because I was _still finding cool stuff._ There’s probably a lot more good stuff out there that I know nothing about.

Meanwhile, [@language-escapes](https://tmblr.co/myVlt-zGeHQrCgBM-5NWkig) already knew the basics, and was alphabetically going through a list of of all the countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, typing “$countryname sherlock holmes” into google to see what would turn up. That’s how she came up with _Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Heroine_ , _O Xangô de Baker Street,_ and some stuff we didn’t use, like the 2012 Hong Kong film, _The Bullet Vanishes._

Aside re _The Bullet Vanishes:_  it had gorgeous source, with lots of visual shout-outs to the Ritchie films, but I never quite convinced myself that the central duo were meant to be Holmes and Watson _themselves,_ or if maybe they were instead meant to be their own thing. When you’re working in languages and cultures not your own, it’s always possible you’re misunderstanding or misappropriating something, and I really didn’t want to do the fannish equivalent of planting a flag in something and claiming it for England. (Admittedly, that’s how Sherlock Holmes became a world-wide phenomenon in the first place, but… yeah.) In contrast to _The Bullet Vanishes_ , including _Jighangsha_ was a fairly straightforward decision _,_ because while the character names and settings are all non-Holmesian, the story is beat-for-beat _Hound of the Baskervilles._  (Not ‘loosely based on’ HOUN, but HOUN _itself:_  Sir Charles’ death, the family physician seeking out Holmes, Sir Hugo’s backstory, H&W visiting Sir Henry at the hotel, the stalker in the cab, Watson being sent alone to the countryside with Sir Henry, Holmes hiding out in the district unbeknownst to everyone and Watson tracking him down to the hut, Holmes and Watson pretending to abandon Sir Henry so as to lure Stapleton into making a move, Sir Henry nearly getting killed as a result… Except for the substitution of a person for the dog there at the end: Beat. For. Beat.)

Anyway, @language-escapes was googling other things, too: “children sherlock holmes,” which resulted in the Hungarian film, _[Sherlock Holmes Nevében](https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php?title=Sherlock_Holmes_Nev%C3%A9ben),_ and “musical sherlock holmes,” which gave us the Korean musical, _Sherlock Holmes: The Secret of the Anderson Family._

So, that’s how we found out that things _existed._ Laying hands on source was a different matter. My number one tip: _don’t search in English_.

For example, when [@language-escapes](https://tmblr.co/myVlt-zGeHQrCgBM-5NWkig) first found the Korean musical, [the only source she could find](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzbj9DofjpE) was unusable for our purposes, covered with watermarks and lower-thirds and ugh. But if you put aside English and search on 뮤지컬 셜록홈즈, then you get lots and lots of pretty source for the show, and if you back off to just 셜록 홈즈, then all sorts of other Sherlockian stuff starts popping up. (Sampler: [Ritchie-esque music video from SHINee](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kyG5tTZ1iE); [Korean SNL sketch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SH1_1OFr_fM); [game show where all the contestants are wearing deerstalkers and racing around a cruise ship looking for clues](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2GY2IlZwM4&list=PL7136172012AAFCF5).) 

If we’d been doing this properly, we probably would have searched on every non-Roman script of ‘sherlock holmes’ that g-translate knows, but it’s a three minute vid and we were already drowning in far more stuff than we could use. Holmesiana is  _really fucking huge,_  y’all. 

There were also situations where we couldn’t find something in its original language, but sometimes we could find it dubbed into something else. My copy of  _Sherlock Holmes Nevében_ is in Portuguese, of all things. (It was originally produced in Hungarian.) The Whitehead/Pickering TV series is hard to find in English [and the quality of the rips are gawdawful](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uKHaCBsqKE&list=PLcvObjGQpCd2hBOm2zSBktJTkFofIKguK), but [the Italian dubs are complete and in half-decent shape](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdrJBV_xtZA). 

Of course, there was still plenty of stuff that defeated our attempts to lay hands on. For kicks, here are a few that looked particularly interesting, but which we never managed to track down:

  * [The Case of the Detective Sherlock Holmes](https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php?title=The_Case_of_the_Detective_Sherlock_Holmes) (1931 silent), Li Pingqian & Xiao Zhengzhong
  * [Sherry Holmes](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2904126/) (2013), Katherine Hengqing Pan & Yiyi Bao
  * [1,000,000 Manat](https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php?title=1,000,000_Manat) (2015), Haji Ismailov & Tarlan Nur Yashar



Maybe you’ll be more successful at finding them than we were. If you could also find an African production of Sherlock Holmes, that would be cool, too: [@language-escapes](https://tmblr.co/myVlt-zGeHQrCgBM-5NWkig) looked and looked, but never found one.

So, yeah! That’s how we found the more obscure stuff.


	4. Sources by Timestamp

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Amindamazed asked for a list of adaptations by timestamp. Half the sources don’t have distinctive titles, so when the title might be less than enlightening, I use the names of the actors who played Holmes and Watson instead. I also included individual episode or film titles when relevant, because when I was making this vid, the people who included that info on gifsets and such made my life SO much easier. 
> 
> Additionally, per a question on tumblr ("What is this femlock and where can I watch it?") I've included the list of sources with a female Holmes and/or Watson, with links to video.

 

 

[Something Good (Will Come From That)](https://vimeo.com/171431158) from [Sanguinity](https://vimeo.com/user221625) on [Vimeo](https://vimeo.com).

 

0:00 Norwood/Willis (Devil's Foot)  
0:04 Elementary (Pilot)  
0:05 Brett/Hardwicke (Empty House)  
0:06 Great Mouse Detective  
0:07 Petrenko/Panin (Baker Street 221B)  
0:11 The Secret of the Anderson Family (Dancing Men)  
0:12 221B Baker Towers (using Attack the Block for source)  
0:13 Brett/Burke (Blue Carbuncle)  
0:14 Cushing/Stock (Blue Carbuncle)  
0:16 RDJ/Law  
0:16 Sherlock (Study in Pink)  
0:18 Petrenko/Panin (Baker Street 221B)  
0:20 Howard/Crawford (Cunningham Heritage)  
0:22 Great Mouse Detective  
0:23 Sherlock (Study in Pink)  
0:23 Elementary (Pilot)  
0:25 Herlock  
0:26 Rathbone/Bruce (Hound of the Baskervilles)  
0:27 Wontner/Fleming (Silver Blaze | Murder at the Bakervilles)  
0:29 Livanov/Solomin (Bloody Inscription)  
0:30 Brett/Burke (Resident Patient)  
0:31 Elementary (Hemlock)  
0:32 My Dearly Beloved Detective  
0:33 Whitehead/Pickering (Final Curtain)  
0:35 Brett/Burke (Blue Carbuncle)  
0:36 Baker/Rigby (Hound of the Baskervilles)  
0:37 22nd Century (Hounds of the Baskervilles)  
0:38 Brett/Hardwicke (Hound of the Baskervilles)  
0:39 Wontner/Fleming (Sliver Blaze | Murder at the Baskervilles)  
0:40 Norwood/Willis (Devil's Root)  
0:41 Howard/Crawford (Violent Suitor)  
0:42 22nd Century (Empty House)  
0:43 Brett/Burke (Resident Patient)  
0:44 Petrenko/Panin (Clown)  
0:45 Wilmer/Stock (Speckled Band)  
0:49 Barrymore/Young  
0:50 Wontner/Fleming (Sleeping Cardinal)  
0:51 Livanov/Solomin (Empty House)  
0:52 Petrenko/Panin (221B Baker Street)  
0:54 Whitehead/Pickering (Speckled Band)  
0:55 Wishbone (The Slobbery Hound)  
0:56 Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Heroine  
0:57 Jighangsha  
0:59 O Xangô de Baker Street  
1:00 Brett/Burke (Final Problem)  
1:01 Livanov/Solomin (Deadly Fight)  
1:03 Petrenko/Panin (Holmes' Last Case)  
1:04 Sherlock (The Reichenbach Fall)  
1:07 RDJ/Law (Game of Shadows)  
1:10 22nd Century (Empty House)  
1:12 Brett/Hardwicke (Empty House)  
1:15 Livanov/Solomin(Empty House)  
1:19 Mr. Holmes  
1:21 Young Sherlock Holmes  
1:22 221B Baker Towers  
1:24 Sherlock (Study in Pink)  
1:25 A Study in Charlotte  
1:26 In Hot Pursuit  
1:26 Baker Street (episode 3)  
1:27 My Dearly Beloved Detective  
1:29 They Might Be Giants  
1:30 1994 Baker Street  
1:31 Elementary (The Deductionist)  
1:32 Elementary (Turn it Upside Down)  
1:34 Brett/Burke (Blue Carbuncle)  
1:36 Frogwares (April Fools Video)  
1:37 RDJ/Law (Game of Shadows)  
1:41 S(her)lock (Vogueing Women)  
1:43 Brett/Burke (Dancing Men)  
1:44 The Secret of the Anderson Family (Dancing Men)  
1:44 S(her)lock (Vogueing Women)  
1:46 Great Mouse Detective  
1:48 Sherlock Holmes Nevében  
1:49 Private Life of Sherlock Holmes  
1:51 S(her)lock (Voguing Women)  
1:54 Seven-Per-Cent Solution  
2:00 Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace  
2:03 Brett/Burke (Speckled Band)  
2:06 Murder by Decree  
2:07 Howard/Crawford (Baker Street Bachelors)  
2:08 Sherlock Hound (Blue Carbuncle)  
2:12 Young Sherlock Holmes  
2:16 Syder/Gareth-Lloyd  
2:23 Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (deleted scene: Naked Honeymooners)  
2:27 Star Trek: The Next Generation (Elementary, My Dear Data)  
2:31 Without a Clue  
2:34 Cushing/Stock (Hound of the Baskervilles)  
2:35 Adventures of Shirley Holmes (Alien Abductions)  
2:36 Gilette/Fielding  
2:37 Baker Street 221B  
2:37 Elementary (Nutmeg Concoction)  
2:38 Veggie Tales (Sheerluck Holmes)  
2:39 Whitehead/Pickering (Midsummer's Eve)  
2:41 Rathbone/Bruce (Pursuit to Algiers)  
2:43 Livanov/Panin (Deadly Fight)  
2:45 Wishbone (A Dogged Exposé)  
2:46 Gillette/Fielding  
2:48 Volkov/Krugliy (Hound of the Baskervilles)  
2:49 Petrenko/Panin (Mistress of Lord Maulbré)  
2:50 Rathbone/Bruce (Pursuit to Algiers)  
2:51 Adventures of Jamie Watson and Sherlock Holmes (Bees and Keys)  
2:52 Wontner/Fleming (Triumph of Sherlock Holmes)  
2:53 Brett/Hardwicke (Silver Blaze)  
2:55 Livanov/Solomin (Empty House)  
2:57 Merrison/Williams (Devil's Root)

~~~

Female Holmes, female Watson:

  * 0:25 [Herlock](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFUMkszczjI&ab_channel=HERLOCK) ([website](http://herlock.us/))
  * 0:33 [My Dearly Beloved Detective](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vphyWrz4Vv4&ab_channel=werfkj)
  * 1:26 [In Hot Pursuit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-Iiy7Qx_C0&ab_channel=MollyMetaphora)
  * 1:27 [Baker Street](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wojZx2HaHE&list=PL6m8pknf2xi8pEsrUqPSgIY2b7QWeGXwa&ab_channel=BakerStreet)
  * 1:41 [S-her-lock](https://vimeo.com/sherlockthewebseries) ([@s-her-lock](http://s-her-lock.tumblr.com/))



Female Holmes, male Watson:

  * 1:25 [A Study in Charlotte](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjIJFW8Uetw&ab_channel=EpicReads)
  * 2:36 [The Adventures of Shirley Holmes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hffYlhEJP1k&list=PLmsYAPce1a9UWR9UKfHgSMDpvtd7AZv-F&ab_channel=ShinthuSoori)



Male Holmes, female Watson:

  * 0:05 Elementary
  * 0:12 [Sherlock Holmes: The Secret of the Anderson Family](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%EC%85%9C%EB%A1%9D%ED%99%88%EC%A6%88%3A+%EC%95%A4%EB%8D%94%EC%8A%A8%EA%B0%80%EC%9D%98+%EB%B9%84%EB%B0%80)   
(no English subs available afaik, but “[The Dancing Men](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfN_9_AzHr0&ab_channel=TV%ED%8A%B9%EC%A2%85)” number is easy enough to follow)
  * 1:29 They Might Be Giants
  * 1:30 [1994 Baker Street](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFcoK75Riq4&ab_channel=KindessisEternal)



Nonbinary Homes, female Watson:

  * 2:52 [The Adventures of Jamie Watson (and Sherlock Holmes)](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMVE5LP7A5WF70jUzhpC6gw?&ab_channel=TheAdventuresofJamieWatson\(andSherlockHolmes\)) ([@theadventuresofjamiewatson](http://theadventuresofjamiewatson.tumblr.com/))



Also, S-her-lock (listed among the f/f adaptations, above) has an explicitly trans Watson, played by a trans actress, Lisa Bunker.

There are at least a few more adaptations with a female Holmes or Watson, but I don’t have a master list anywhere, sorry.

For those who are interested, there’s also a glimpse of a female Lestrade in the vid:

  * 0:37 [Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxmoOUsZzOs&list=PL601298EF51925F66&ab_channel=Shawnchapp)



Off the top of my head, there are at least two more female Lestrades on screen: S-her-lock (listed above) and [Sherlock Holmes in the 23rd Century](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSmu1t4qRls&ab_channel=CHILDHOODCARTOONS), which also boasts a female Mycroft. (Note: 2 _3rd_  Century is a completely different show than 2 _2nd_ Century.)


End file.
